Porridge

ONE POEM – Siobhan Ward

Its big head, glassy stare
and halting hobble
from random ewe to ewe
made me think of you –

TWO POEMS – DS Maolalai

they sit on the bridge. they cluster
as close as the round bulbs
of road-swollen blackberries,
dusty with travel.

ONE POEM – Olivia Heggarty

Cutting my hair with the meat scissors,
being told off for not using a hairdresser,
explaining that if I don’t change something

often I will do something worse

Metaphor, Make-believe and Misleading Information in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – Charley Barnes

‘Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.’ (84) In definition of genre, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) has a wingspan that ranges fiction, nonfiction, and the ambiguous nonfiction novel. In definition of content, it is both a book with ‘dramatic power’ that warrants ‘honorary…

ONE POEM – Amanda Huggins

we revered those rake-limbed lads
on the slot machines
as though they were gods,
not fishermen’s lads.

ONE POEM – Srinjay Chakravarti

It will not miss
a trick—
or treat.
Its bulging eyeballs
on a roll,
it makes an advance
and then stops.

Three from Color Wheel — Salvatore Difalco

Underscoring the onset of nausea on the pier, feelings of self-loathing
also bubble up to the surface. “I get seasick in the bathtub, man,”
declares a ponytailed dude in Plymouth pink.

Radio Music Magic – Paul Sasges

Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio Turn it up, that’s enough, so you know it’s got soul. ‘Caravan’, Van Morrison, 1970 The transistor radio came out between the vacuum tube in the fifties and the Walkman in the seventies. I spent many hours on our braided area rug prone upon my…

Good and Beautiful — Laura Eppinger

Henri is at least good for catching the scent of socio-political turmoil in the air.

My Mother’s Quilt – Clare Reddaway

This is my mother’s quilt, but many other women have had a hand in it. It was started by my mother in the 1950s, and she made it for most of my life, in admittedly rather a desultory fashion. I remember her sitting on a freezing, pebbly beach in Suffolk, with the grey North Sea…

TWO POEMS – Janet McCann

Something Lives Something lives in the crawl spaceAbove my room. A bird? Maybe a rat?Sometimes it seems to be shaking out its feathers.But then there’s a scrabbling overheadAnd the squares of insulation quiver. I’m not afraid of you, I tell the shaking panels.We all have the right to be.And I will not pursue you with…

Tea for a Pandemic – Terry Kirts

1. My grandmother was a kitchen singer, an apron wearer who trilled the rs and drew out the tra-la-las in all the old songs while she kneaded bread dough or blanched tomatoes. Some days growing up, I spent more time in her windswept farmhouse outside of town than I did in my own home, my…

ONE POEM – Constance von Igel

Brazil has 27 administrative regions, and we found
The strongest evidence of your ancestry,
In the following 10 regions.

ONE POEM – Sofia Lyall

I find the roots of an oak (dead, upturned, twisted)
and am left more disoriented than before.

Roses in the Attic: Ruminations on Moving Back Home – Abby Connolly

It had almost been a year. This night, a year ago, was when I had had to come back. The realisation was a rock in my gut that nauseously listed every now and then to the side, keeping me awake. It was the sensation of motion in the deprivation-tank stillness of night that displaced me…

The Sea People — Euan Currie

I often fantasise about tipping the cabinet forward until the plastic drawers slide out and spill their contents in a wave of plastic. I tell myself they should be recycled or reused. But in the fantasy it all just spills out and keeps on spilling.

Mesoamerican Triptych – William Fleeson

Pérado I. Pérado stretched over its one paved road, the village elongated to avoid the mud of the side streets. Haitians called out Blan! – “White man!” – wanting attention or a cash handout or, failing the former, cash alone. I stopped for lunch at a roadside shack. They had rice and chicken and pikliz…

ART // SOUL COLLECTION – Ken Nakajima

‘What colour do you feel most connected to?

The Other Half-Orphan – Thomas Stewart

I was not the first. I knew that when it happened. But you feel like the only one it’s happening to. Because it’s happening to you, and there’s only one you. My father died when I was 23. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in July and died in February the next year. For the…

Something You Can Feel in Your Teeth — Hannah Stevens

Neither of them talk much in the morning. Somehow things are more difficult in the early hours. She feels more fragile, more lost, more oppressed by the narrow confines and the lack of light.

The Ache for Home – Sally Gander

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we areand not be questioned. Maya Angelou The box room where I was staying was dark, always dark. The window let in only a sliver of light and the lamp cast a weak pool of yellow over dark-painted…

Lord of the Ocean – Aneeta Sundararaj

“China is going to take over our world,” my friend declared. Unlikely to happen! I didn’t say the words aloud, though, for this man’s convictions were delivered with such ferocity that any meaningful debate was impossible. Rumour had it that he believed that every country was doomed to inevitable failure unless it bowed down to…

ONE POEM – Kira Scott

these are the tears that we cannot shed
as we comment on the beauty of the glen and
how wonderful it must have been to live in such a place.

White Noise Inside the Supermarket: Reading DeLillo during a Pandemic – Michael P. Mazenko

Wandering the aisles of my neighborhood supermarket, the kind of place Don DeLillo once wrote evoked “a sense of replenishment … and fullness of being,” I tread cautiously out of suspicion and respect for the potential “airborne toxic event” that is the coronavirus pandemic. As the world continues to pass milestones of Covid infections, I…

TWO POEMS – Tim Kiely

the cake is made of Walthamstow
a dense and glutinous Walthamstow
we are going to make Walthamstow
a Titanic success for Walthamstow

Back Home in Old Kentucky – Bailey Vandiver

Kentucky governor Happy Chandler once said Kentuckians are always either coming home or thinking about coming home. On the day that tornadoes devastated my home state, I was longing to be home. It was December 11, 2021, and I woke up in a New York City hotel room to the news that tornadoes had ripped…

COMFORT FOODS // What’s for Dinner? The Friday Night Table in Ashkenazi Culture — Hannah-Clare de Gordun

Through this shared language, seen in the celebration of Shabbat at our round dinner table, we create a “home”, a space of belonging, for a culture that has frequently been forcefully ripped from its physical roots.

ONE POEM – Noemi Gunea

I wanted you so much
I started making things up

Scheherazade — Lydia Waites

He studies me for a second before facing the road again, his jaw set. My breath is caught in my throat. I clear it, arranging my thoughts. It was just an outburst, a loss of patience: I am safe.

Fiachaire — Shannen Malone

“We can’t take it all,” her brother had said, tossing memories in a bin bag like kittens for drowning.

ONE POEM – Hideko Sueoka

Bright rays reflect, shape, shake her portrait on the water skin
and it’s broken, burnt, soon gone.

ONE POEM – Bernadette Gallagher

Get some hens
dig up the garden
sow and plant.

ONE POEM — Judith Amanthis

From the yew-dark wool you pulled
over my eyeball,
knit one, maul one,
you made a beam

ONE POEM — Matthew Moniz

But Jesus never saved the birds. A bird
has never sinned. They have no need for grace,
salvation, guilt, contrition, holy words,

ONE POEM — Oliver Sedano-Jones

I walk along the beach; I find a bad thing so beautiful
That now it’s a good thing

ONE POEM — Toby Jackson

But Krakow, why am I in Krakow looking for size eight shoes
following a strolling man with a hand-shaped dent in his hat?

ONE POEM – Greg Jensen

sharp as a thorn.
I held on
to whatever

it had been
at the start of existence,
a stem cell

When Will My Sense of Linear Time Come Back From the War? – Nat Guest

Time’s gone weird, hasn’t it? Hasn’t time gone weird? I’m really struggling with it at the moment. I don’t know what day it is. I’m not sure whether it’s day. It’s 2023 next year. It’s still March 2020. It’s the dead zone between Christmas and New Year. It’s been Wednesday for months. I’ll be dead…